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What Does God Know About Marriage?

This week, the Southern Baptist Convention reiterated its opposition to equality in marriage rights for heterosexual and homosexual couples. The Southern Baptists’ new president said that Americans ought to live under “God’s definition of marriage”. What he didn’t explain is why that ought to be the case.

Why should all Americans have to live under “God’s definition of marriage”, when increasing numbers of Americans, in every state do not believe in “God”? There’s no evidence that this God character ever has really existed, much less created reliable and useful definitions of things.

But, even if this God thing exists, why should we trust its opinions about marriage? According to Christians’ own descriptions of the supernatural character, “God” has never been married, and grew up without married parents. The new president of the Southern Baptist Convention says that everyone should have a mother and a father, but if “God” didn’t have a mother and a father, why does this particular arrangement have to be a requirement for everyone else?

We might as well ask a cheetah for a definition of scuba diving. We might as well listen to a clam giving advice about the best way to brush our teeth. I don’t think that any definition by any unmarried god has much relevance for the quality of married life… and neither does the opinion of the Southern Baptist Convention.

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About the authorJim Cook

I haven't been everywhere, but I've lived lots of places in the USA: the North, the South, the East, the West, and places in between. Every place I've been, I've seen acts large and small of kindness, callousness and disregard. Here we are. What will we do?

Yes, well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? What they say is “God’s definition of marriage” is really just the Southern Baptist Convention’s definition of marriage. It’s just what they want, because… they’re a bunch of hateful bigots.

Here in NC, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a Southern Baptist…probably the main reason why Amendment 1 passed recently, making same-sex marriage unconstitutional.

I know a lot of SoBaps, and I like and respect many of them as fellow flawed human beings, but their theology leaves me ice-cold, so I just don’t go there with them. Still, where there’s life, there’s hope: the Southern Baptist Convention just elected their first black president, thereby entering the 1970s. Not many years ago they would have considered that itself a mortal sin.

God not only created the definition of marriage–He created marriage itself. So supporting God’s definition of marriage is not like asking a cheetah to define scuba diving. It’s much more like asking an engineer to discuss engineering.

Fitzer, I hate your title to this article. Of course God knows all about marriage. He doesn’t have to have been married to know about it, or about anything, because He is omniscient. He knows everything.

What’s more, He’s so smart, He even knows that He doesn’t actually exist. Which is more than some people commenting on this blog know.

Look, don’t pick on me, I’m not the expert here. I did badly in first grade Sunday School. But God does know (being All-Knowing), so I’ll let Him defend Himself (you see, He’s All-Powerful, too, you know).

“University of Oregon Professor Azim Shariff and University of Kansas Professor Mijke Rhemtulla published an interesting study in the scientific journal PloS One finding that people who believe in heaven are more likely to commit a crime.”

Hey folks, those who acknowledge the existence of God are not the only ones with the burden of proof. Those who deny His existence also have a duty to back up what they say with something more substantial than sarcasm. Sarcasm fails as a rhetorical device when it’s unsupported by a rational argument.

One more word about that horrible sarcasm. It’s simply unchristian. If only our dear Torquemada were here to take care of it. Or Oliver Cromwell. There was no place for such humor then, just as there’s no place for it now.

JJ, what exactly do you think is lacking in the rational department here? People who don’t rely on the non-rational faith in the existence of an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient supernatural being work simply from the facts:

Fact: Homosexual marriages are numerous and appear to be just about as stable as heterosexual marriages. There’s no evidence of a correlation between psychological or social problems and the legalization of same-sex marriage.

Conclusion: There is no rationally justified legal or societal basis for objection to the legal equality of heterosexual and homosexual marriages.

In the face of the clear, rational case for the legalization of same-sex marriage, religious opponents of legalization have had to resort to absurd claims about the preferences of an invisible ruler of the universe.

When choosing between one side whose argument relies on the belief without evidence in invisible supernatural forces, and another side whose argument does not rely on the presumption that invisible supernatural forces are at work, there’s no contest.

F.G., the last two comments attributed to me (dated 6/28/2012, 10:51 a.m., and 6/28/2012, 10:59 a.m.) were not made by me. Someone thought the best rhetorical strategy would be to put words in my mouth–presumably because nothing would sound good coming out of their own.

It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection. These are the times when maps fade, old landmarks crumble and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.